Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and The South American Cold War, Mila Burns, 2025, University Of North Carolina Press
The vertiginous decline in relations between Brazil and the US since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January could not be more significant for Latin America.
The Trump administration has taken a series of hostile steps towards Brasília, from punitive tariffs and sanctions to open criticism and threats.
At one level, it is ostensibly to do with the prosecution of Brazil’s former far-right populist president Jair Bolsonaro, whose coup plot in January 2023 failed spectacularly and earned him a conviction for attempting to overthrow democracy.
Trump and his inner circle have justified their hostility based on what the US president has called a “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro, and have actively sought to influence judicial outcomes in Brazil and secure the liberty of their political ally by threatening retaliation.
But why would Trump and his security establishment make so much noise about a minor political ally generally regarded in the White House as more irritant than statesman?
After all, other than modelling himself on his US idol and copying his playbook—the ransacking of Brasília was a clumsy repeat of Trump’s attempted autogolpe on the US Capitol in January 2021—Bolsonaro “was a bad soldier, a bad congressman and a bad president”.
The answer can be summarised in one word: China.
While Washington cares little about the domestic agenda of Bolsonaro’s leftwing nemesis Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, it cares greatly about Brazilian foreign policy autonomy, a defining feature of Lula’s international agenda.
Brazil and the US under Trump have very different views of the emerging international order, and these contrast most dramatically over the role of China, which to Brasília is seen as a fellow member of the Brics pursuing a broader non-alignment in geopolitical relations.
Under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, Washington found itself in the frustrating position of having to recognise that this growing South American power would not be cajoled into joining an anti-China coalition, and hence to reconcile itself to Brazilian autonomy.
That is why Biden is hailed for being on the “right side of history” when he signalled clearly to Bolsonaro that he would not support any effort to curtail the democratic process through a coup or other means to prevent Lula taking the presidency.
This was not a demonstration of democratic vocation, but simple realpolitik—acknowledgement that Brazil has become too big to push around and it would be hard, if not impossible, to engineer an electoral outcome directly in the US interest.
It explains why Biden’s attitude was in stark contrast to the 1964 coup in Brazil, when the US overtly backed and collaborated with the rebellion led by rightwing military officers to depose President João Goulart, the leftwing leader of the Brazilian Labour Party (PTB). (The historical echoes are spine-tingling—remember, Goulart was the last leftwing president of Brazil until Lula first took office in 2003.)
It is also why the Trump administration has been so assertive in its support of Bolsonaro—with one eye on the Brazilian presidential elections scheduled for October 2026—whom it sees as the best bet of a change in foreign policy towards Beijing.
Indeed, Bolsonaro demonstrated this directly. Scholars have examined how, with his election in 2018, he began to pursue a policy aligned with the US by taking a far more confrontational approach towards China, such that his scepticism of Beijing’s intentions and ideology was clearly redolent of Brazil’s attitude during the right-wing military regime of 1964–1985.
In short, the Lula administration’s recent diplomatic offensive towards China is a response both to the new urgency placed by Washington on disrupting any improvement in regional relations with Beijing, as well as direct US pressure through the Bolsonaro case.
One example of what is at stake is Lula’s decision in September to send generals as military attachés to the Brazilian embassy in China—a practice until now reserved exclusively for the US—symbolic of a significant shift in Brazil’s defence diplomacy.
Any consideration of Brazilian autonomy raises important questions for the present—but also about the past, making Mila Burns’ history of Brazil’s role in the military coup that ousted Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende a timely contribution to debates.
This eye-opening study offers an important reinterpretation of the main narratives about outside interference in Chile dominated, naturally, by the role of the US—but may also pose by implication deeply unsettling questions about the Brazilian military in the Trump era.
Dictatorship Across Borders: Brazil, Chile, and The South American Cold War is set in the context of Allende’s election as president of Chile in 1970, when Brazil had been a rightwing civil-military dictatorship for six years.
A socialist leader in a neighbouring state was bad news, epitomising the threat of communism and offering a safe haven for hundreds of opponents of the Brazilian dictatorship.
Burns shows how, for years, Brazil’s regime actively sought to undermine Allende’s Marxist government by working with US intelligence services or independently by spying on his supporters or assisting Chile’s golpistas under Augusto Pinochet.
While it seems clear that the US was often pulling the strings in this endeavour overall, Burns demonstrates using new documentation and oral histories that Brazil acted autonomously through its diplomats and agents in its destabilisation efforts.
The Brazilian dictatorship celebrated the coup and then gave the Pinochet regime critically important support, sending cornflour and sugar to make up for supplies curtailed by the Soviet Union and Cuba. It opened a $50m line of credit to Santiago, and provided Pinochet’s vile cohorts with torturers, medical supplies and weapons—often in concealed ways.
Driven by a doctrine of national security, Brazil internationalised its model of state terror and political repression via Chile, helping to launch the infamous Operation Condor among the Southern Cone dictatorships that caused 60,000 deaths.
Burns writes: “Although these efforts to keep secret the Brazilian participation in the overthrow of Allende were successful, and such interference remained obfuscated by the US role, it is finally possible to establish that responsibility and demand accountability … the Brazilian government provided money, weapons, medicine, expertise, intelligence reports, and torturers to the enemies of the Allende government prior to the coup and after the Chilean military took power.”
The author acknowledges the key role of Washington in both the Brazilian coup of 1964 and Chilean coup of 1973, and how US anti-communism chimed with the regimes that came to power in both countries.
She writes: “However, the perception that Brazil was a mere pawn of the United States, attempting to exercise a kind of ‘sub-imperialism’, could not be further from reality. President Médici [1969–74] was eager to pursue exclusively Brazilian policies without direction from the United States.”
Dictatorship Across Borders is a critically important contribution to our understanding of Cold War history in South America, but Burns also makes a telling reference to how the echoes of past authoritarianism continue to shape contemporary politics—not least in the recurrent admiration shown by Bolsonaro, a former soldier, for the military dictatorship.
This is of great importance because Brazil’s military has yet to be brought to account for its role in the Bolsonaro plot, which some observers attribute to an isolated and privileged military caste that continue to enjoy significant independence from democratic authority.
As the journalist Tiago Rogero has argued, there is evidence and a body of expert opinion that Bolsonaro was only the figurehead for another military coup in the making, and that the Brazilian army’s elite “black cap boys”, trained in sabotage operations, were actively targeting infrastructure in readiness.
Bolsonaro was convicted along with seven close allies—including five top military officers. Twenty-five alleged conspirators, including 18 military personnel, still face trial.
Some historians suggest the mentality of Brazil’s armed forces remains essentially unchanged since the military dictatorship and they still believe that they should have the final say on what is best for the country.
Ironically, under the PT Brazilian administrations have significantly militarised defence policymaking and increased the involvement of the armed forces in public security, infrastructure development and public administration.
There are also signs of unease in Brazil’s armed forces at the deterioration in ties with Washington if it threatens projects linked to the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) US security assistance programme—a tried and tested method of pocketing foreign generals.
It is also becoming clear that Trump’s gambit off the coast of Venezuela, where the US is building up a formidable military presence to pressure President Nicolás Maduro to leave power, is mostly an appeal to the country’s military top brass to oust him through a coup.
While this echoes what Venezuela’s US-backed conservative opposition have long called for, when considered alongside Trump’s support for Bolsonaro it has chilling implications.
Latin America risks being dragged back from its remarkable democratic interregnum to an era in which a neocolonial, almighty and unrepentant Washington sees support for military regimes as the ultimate guarantee of its interests.
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Categories: Brazil, Chile, North America, South America, United States